“Well, that takes care of Hewett’s Theater,” Peggy said sadly, crossing off the name on her list. “Now let’s try the Emperor. It’s only two blocks away.”
The Emperor Theater was now effectively disguised as a Greek Orthodox church, complete with a turnip-shaped steeple and a Russian signboard outside. The next theater on the list was a large and gaudy caterer’s hall, used for weddings, parties, lodge meetings, and dances, according to its poster. The next two on the list had also totally disappeared, giving way to a garage and an apartment house.
“This is hardly encouraging,” Amy said. “I somehow feel already that we’re on a wild-goose chase.”
“Amy, this is no time to get discouraged!” Peggy said. “Why, we’ve only gone to five places, and we’ve got nearly forty more on the list! And, after all, it’s not as if we were looking for a dozen theaters. All we want is one, so I don’t care if all but one prove to be shut or converted. And we have to see them all, just in case it’s the last one that turns out to be for us!”
“That makes sense,” Amy agreed, “and I certainly don’t want to quit. It’s just that I wish we had hit it right the first time!”
“You’re a lazy girl,” Peggy reproached her. “Do you know the way I feel about it? Even if we had found a good theater on our first call, I’d still want to see everything else on the list, just to make sure that we had the best one!”
After some more walking, in which they found two more missing theaters and one that had been converted to a funeral parlor, they decided to stop for lunch in a delicatessen where sausages of every shape and size hung like decorations from the ceiling. They sat at a small table near open barrels of pickles, pickled tomatoes, and sauerkraut and stuffed themselves with corned-beef sandwiches on fresh, fragrant rye bread dotted with caraway seeds, homemade potato salad, cole slaw, and pickles. Afterward, they felt much better, and more heartened for the rest of the day’s search.
As they worked their way downtown, the neighborhood began to change once more, and the girls were unable to guess what might be the nationality of the dark, strong-faced people they now saw about them. The signs on the windows didn’t help either, being in a language they could not identify.
It might have remained a mystery, had they not been stopped by a policeman who said, “What are a couple of nice-looking girls like you doing in the Gypsy section? This is no place to sight-see, you know. I’d advise you to take a guided tour.”
“We’re not sight-seeing,” Peggy said. “We’re looking for an address—actually for an old theater. Maybe you can help us. We want to find the Burke Theater, if it still exists.”